Hiring Frenzy Swamps Schwab

Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 26, 1999

Many investors are opting for electronic stock trading, which has made Schwab one of the biggest employers in the Bay Area.

Many investors are opting for electronic stock trading, which has made Schwab one of the biggest employers in the Bay Area.

Hiring Frenzy Swamps Schwab

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Let's say you had to hire a few good people for your company.

For instance . . . 1,500 of them at one time.

That's the challenge facing recruiters at Charles Schwab Corp., the San Francisco discount brokerage firm that has become one of the Bay Area's biggest employers.

Schwab currently has 1,500 open positions -- part of a dramatic, continuing expansion fuelled by the spread of electronic stock trading and by Americans' love affair with the stock market.

Schwab embraced Web-based trading more quickly than other major brokerages and now handles more than 150,000 online trades each day. About one of every 20 stock trades in America now is handled by Schwab.

The company has had to hire like crazy to keep up. In 1998, Schwab added 1,500 new positions to reach a workforce of 15,500.

Many of those new jobs were at its San Francisco headquarters. Bay Area employment at Schwab rose by a hefty 44 percent last year, from 3,200 to 4,600.

How do Schwab's recruiters fill all these new jobs?

For starters, there are a lot of them -- 100 full-time Schwab employees and contractors who do nothing but recruit and hire applicants.

"It's a very challenging juggling act," acknowledged Andy Rich, head of human resources for the company. "At any given time, we'll have 10,000 resumes coming in through the Internet or conventional means."

Schwab's challenge is heightened by the fact that many of its openings are for technology professionals -- one of the hardest groups of workers to hire these days.

Schwab is lucky to be located near Silicon Valley, with its deep pool of skilled high-tech workers. But that's also a disadvantage: The brokerage firm has to compete for workers with top tech firms like Sun Microsystems and Intel.

To lure high-tech professionals, Schwab has hosted a series of free "Investech" seminars to showcase what they're doing with technology.

"Our competition (for workers) is Silicon Valley," said Shelly Anderson, vice president of staffing for Schwab. "It's important for us to create a brand image of Schwab as a technology employer."

In both tech and nontech areas, Schwab relies heavily on current employees to recruit their friends and associates. Twenty percent of outside hires come from employee referrals. Schwab has given bonuses of up to $3,000 to workers who referred successful job candidates.

One recent ad in the Wall Street Journal played upon the company's vast number of openings: "Schwab is looking for 1,000 people who want to change the way the world invests," it read.

Regardless of how candidates are found, the great majority submit their resumes electronically.

"It used to be that 90 percent of resumes came in by mail and 10 percent by fax," Anderson said. "Now, we get 70 percent by e-mail and maybe 20 per week by regular mail."

Despite Schwab's ambitious recruiting program, it still takes an average of 45 days to fill most positions, and 60 days for technical positions. Some hard-to-fill Internet-related jobs sit open for six months.

So along with recruiting, Schwab has crafted other strategies to handle its mushrooming workload.

The company recently developed a system of employee "reserves" -- people who can be pulled away from their regular jobs to help with customer service when there's a business crunch.

And Schwab purposefully uses independent contractors for a big chunk of its work, to avoid painful layoffs of permanent staff.

In past years, as much as 20 percent of the workforce has been made up of contractors. Currently, the figure is closer to 10 percent.

"The company is very forthright about the fact it doesn't want to have layoffs," Anderson said. "As a result, we're always cautious about the number of people we add."